Any consumable energy including electricity, water, gas etc, has to be measured for the purpose of billing. Traditionally energy consumed is measured using mechanical meters. Due to the rapid increase in the number of consumers, the requirement has gone up and data collection for the purpose of billing has raised lot of concerns. So the idea of automation came by way of using radio frequency techniques, drive way systems etc. for the purpose of data transmission. This type of automated meters offers the benefits of improved reliability, accuracy, security along with advanced billing features. These automated meters offer energy consumers the opportunity to manage their energy usage in a better way.
Though Automated Meter Reading (AMR) systems are known in prior art, they provide only partial automation/require manual intervention. The commonly used AMR systems include: (1) AMR using a handheld device to retrieve the data from an energy meter with similar facility to deliver data to the device. In this case, a meter reader carries a handheld device with a built-in or attached receiver/transceiver (radio frequency or touch) to collect meter readings from an AMR capable meter. Manual intervention is very much needed in this case and delay in data collection and processing is still the same when compared with the ordinary mechanical meter. (2) Another mode of automation is the drive-way system wherein a vehicle fitted with the necessary mechanism will be driven through the street and the meters fixed at the consumer premises will send the data to this device. This method is successful only in well planned cities and very rarely used. (3) In data concentrator AMR, all the meters send data to a common device called data concentrator through the same Power line and from there to the central server using modems/dialup up techniques.
A further limitation of the conventional AMR system is that they do not accommodate the requirements of end-user systems (e.g., billing systems, energy management systems and supervisory control systems). These systems are typically standalone systems/add on, separate from the metering system. One of the primary reasons that the requirements of end-user systems are not met is because of the above-mentioned limitations. Conventional AMR systems were designed as proprietary systems rather than open systems. Open protocol has been developed and all meter manufactures have started using the set protocol. However, a lot of issues relating to automation are still continuing. Conventional AMR systems do not perform validation, editing and estimation of the output data, and require a relatively high amount of manual intervention to transfer data from the AMR system to end users for further processing. Also the ownership of the metes and the software applications lie with different group/companies. After sales, services are mom complex and difficult.
As a next step, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems have been introduced for providing two way communications between the meter and the server. The AMI systems have gained interest because conventional AMR systems typically use only one type of communication infrastructure to transfer data and so it becomes costly and labour intensive to collect data from many meters due to their distributed location.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,183,995 and 7,890,436 disclose systems and/or methods for measuring the energy resources like wind, solar using automatic meter reading. The data collected by the metering system is communicated through either one of the communication mediums such as GPRS, EDGE, etc.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,867,707, 5,594,740, 7,880,641, 8,294,568, 6,088,659, 8,164,479 and U.S. Patent Application No. 20120072033 disclose systems which include bi-directional or unidirectional/Automatic Meter Reading with AMI using various communication protocols and mediums like GSM, GPRS and Wi-Fi for data communication. It either include technologies like GPS, GIS for reporting location/timing synchronization or support cross platform.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,325,057, 8,055,461, 8,212,687, 8,325,060, 8,271,336, 7,746,246, 7,671,480, 8,310,341, 8,242,931 and U.S. Patent Application Nos. 2011273305, 20120019395 deal with automatic metering systems to measure the energy consumption and communicate through one of the technologies like CDMA, Wi-Fi, GSM, GPRS, PSTN and PLC etc. and various wireless protocols are used for communications.
Existing methods discussed in the prior art have one or more drawbacks such as (1) meter without inbuilt bi-directional communication options, (2) no auto registration facilities (3) no bi-directional metering or net metering with inbuilt multiple bi-directional communication options (4) no post payment and prepayment metering using the same meter (5) no server application which does support all available computer operating systems (6) Communication lacks in unique communication protocol using advanced compression techniques and security (7) dependencies for data transfer is very Complex (8) no system capable of sending information like payment details, payment last date remainder etc., to consumers mobile phone or secondary display automatically in human readable format.
Hence, there is a need for an entire and efficient resource management system to overcome the above mentioned limitations. Thus the system of the present invention provides a clear, fast, precise and transparent resource management solution in a fully automated manner.